June 13, 2011Cory Haim, Cory Feldman, Johnny Depp, Michael J Fox, Backstreet Boys, New Kids on the Block, Jason Priestly, and Luke Perry were all teen idols― before the advent of the internet. And if we liked them, we joined their fan club, pinned glossy pictures from Tiger Beat on our door, wrote their name on our binders, folders, and bookcovers, bought T-shirts and beach towels with their photos or shows emblazoned on them, and spent entirely too much time learning everything we could about their fav foods, fav color, and preferred pastimes, which we gushed over with our friends. This sharing bonded us. Teen idols provided a common ground for gossip; for the sharing of innermost thoughts and feelings, for the negotiation of opinions, and most importantly, for the building of trust upon which social relationships are predicated. We tore up pages of stars we did not like, and that bonded us too. Maybe we even said they were ‘gay’. But such a statement was made to others we knew, from whom we wanted to differentiate ourselves. Michael J. Fox (for example) was gay for a reason: assertion of his ‘gayness’ created of solidarity with (or distance from) others, while communicating our personal tastes and values to those in our social circle. But Justin Bieber, why is he gay? Why have 940,000 individuals visited hate sites and aggressively, even angrily, pronounced him a ‘fag’? Sharing this opinion is not part of the dance which creates social bonds between people. Visitors to these sites don’t know each other and rarely, if ever, will. Sharing their thoughts and feelings has little or no impact on their relationship to other people. Yet with such an overwhelming response, this cybergossip / hate must be serving some function.Why is Justin Bieber gay?